I don't understand much about A New Wave, I'm afraid. I don't understand what the title's supposed to mean. I don't understand the tagline. I don't understand how the plot was supposed to be compelling. And I don't understand why it was made.

The film is a post-modern pastiche of heist flick and comedy, the kind popularized by Reservoir Dogs and knocked off endlessly ever since it was released. In A New Wave we have a bored bank teller named Desmond (Andrew Keegan) who dreams of the big time, so he kicks in with pals Gideon (John Krasinski) and Rupert (Dean Edwards), who plan to rob the bank where he works. The "perfect plan" described on the DVD cover is pretty asinine: They other two guys will simply go to the bank when Desmond's on duty, rob it, and have Desmond fill up the moneybags. Desmond even tells them they're trained not to trip the alarms, so no need to worry about cops. Gideon scripts the robbery as if it's a movie, complete with dialogue and costumes. He's obsessed with other films, so he borrows from every gangster flick in the book, including Dogs. (Yes, A New Wave is yet another movie so unoriginal it openly borrows from other movies in the hopes of being clever.)

Wait just a sec. Shouldn't this really be National Lampoon's Extreme Dating? What with the tired, insulting plot, B-list cast, and quickie production values that emphasize sex appeal (but offer no actual sex), this really should have earned the Lampoon seal of mediocrity.

Extreme Dating doesn't even reach mediocrity, actually. It's a stupid, painful movie about the lengths to which a collection of losers (we're meant to think they're kinda geeky cool, but really they're far from it) will go in order to find love. Or at least get a little nookie. Devon Sawa (aging badly) gets tongue-tied around the ladies. Amanda Detmer has a reputation for being bitchy and accident-prone. And Andrew Keegan is just a cocky, god-awful ass.

Boy meets girl. Another boy bets boy he can't score with girl. Boy pays third boy to try to loosen up girl's sister so he can get girl. Serious themes that haven't been explored since... well... since She's All That.

At least 10 Things I Hate About You has one hell of a good title. I give it points for that alone. And while this updating of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew is clever and funny at times, much of the film is just not entertaining due to bad directing by way-out-of-his-element first-timer Gil Junger.

Well, all good classics eventually come to a crashing end (Planet of the Apes, anyone?), and the works of Shakespeare are no exception. This time out, it's Othello that gets an urban/teen makeover -- and considering that Slick Willy's themes about the hazards of interracial relationships are still present after 400 years, you'd think O would be a gimme. No such luck.

With this updating, Othello and Desdemona have become Odin and Desi. Odin (Mekhi Phifer) is the sole black student at a ritzy prep school for the overly wealthy. He's also the star basketball player, destined for greatness in college ball, at least. He carries on a semi-secret love affair with Desi (Julia Stiles), a waifish Julia Stiles stock character, who is also the daughter of the dean (John Heard). The basketball coach (Martin Sheen) favors his star player, of course, virtually ignoring his own son Hugo (Josh Hartnett, in the famed and villainous Iago role), who even turns to steroids (gasp!) to improve his performance in an attempt to match Odin's court prowess. After years of no luck and less love, Hugo eventually masterminds a plan to disgrace Odin... all of which ends disastrously, as you know if you've ever read the play.

The sad-sack group of gay men have already become a budding Hollywood cliché, but The Broken Hearts Club manages to rise above its otherwise menial trappings to be a better-than-average comedy that's still unabashedly about "being gay," while still carrying broad appeal for everyone.

With a cast largely composed of non-gay men, you'd be surprised how convincing the likes of Timothy Olyphant and Dean Cain are at playing it fey. Olyphant stars as a likeable photographer/waiter looking to focus his life away from destructive one-night relationships and into something more meaningful. His roommate (Cain) is no help, a pretty boy actor who lands anyone he wants in the sack. Coupled with a half-dozen other characters, the fellows hang out at a restaurant & bar called Jack's Broken Heart (run by none other than a hilarious John Mahoney, who spends Saturday nights crooning in an ill-advised drag costume and the weekends managing the worst softball team in West Hollywood).

What the hell? Post-apocalyptic teens wander out of the forest and into a bombed out Seattle, enounter a solar-powered house, and start having lots of sex. After that comes something about an immortality serum which has the unfortunate side effect of blowing up some of its users. This isn't Skinemax exploitation: It's meant as a half-jokie farce by auteur Larry Clark, best known as the man behind such gritty reality-inspired movies like Bully. Larry, what are you doing slumming it with non-material like this?

For a gay movie that purports to be about real people -- as opposed to melodramatic stereotypes or comedy caricatures -- "The Broken Hearts Club" comes across pretty contrived.

Not only do the ensemble players include such stock West Hollywood denizens as the bimbo hunk and the queeny cry baby with a jones for redecorating, but these clichés are also introduced immediately following a coffee shop gripe session scene about how gays in the movies are always sex maniacs, confidants to lovelorn women, AIDS victims or friends of AIDS victims.

Writer-director Greg Berlanti (a producer on "Dawson's Creek") doesn't seem to realize he's contributing to this very problem. And he's far too green a filmmaker to be passing judgment anyway. This is his first film and it's riddled with nagging script deficiencies (most of these "real people" don't seem to have jobs) and bad technical calls, like the gratuitous, intrusive and annoying overuse of hand-held cameras.

There's just no excuse for making a Shakespeare knock-off with "Savedby the Bell" quality dialogue. When a movie modernizes The Bard, evenif it's set it in a high school, the chief obligation is to dialogue aboveall else.

"10 Things I Hate About You" -- a "Clueless"-spawnremake of "The Taming of the Shrew" -- while an above averageentry in the recent pool of teen-targeted pics, is sorely lacking in thisarena.

Penned by two office temps-cum-screenwriters and directedby a feature film rookie (Gil Junger) as well, "10 Things" isa bright idea (I'm always an advocate of fiddling with Shakespeare), butit is an interpretation without poetry or rhythm, occasionally cashingin on multi-syllabic, Scrabble-winning words in a misguided attempt tomake its characters look rebelliously intellectual.

Rob Schneider's new low-brow body-swap romp "The Hot Chick" is such an insipidly sexist so-called comedy that the movie's entire female cast is reduced to jumping up and down, giggling and playing patty-cake while rhyming about the ickiness of sex.

These characters don't have a brain cell to share among them, but Schneider (who plays an idiot too, but what else is new?) and director Tom Brady genuinely expect the audience to identify with these one-dimensional teenage airheads.

More specifically, they expect us to identify with catty queen ditz Jessica (Rachel McAdams), who, through a curse not worth explaining here, wakes up in the short, hairy, burlap-sack body of a scummy, gas-station-robbing low-life (Schneider) just a few days before the prom.

William Shakespeare plays reinvented as modern-language high school movies have become a mini-genre unto themselves in the last few years. But the very fact that "10 Things I Hate About You" ("The Taming of the Shrew") and "Get Over It" ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") were comedies gave them some leeway from literary scrutiny. They were, after all, just for fun.

That kind of forgiveness is hard to apply to the awkward alterations that arise in Tim Blake Nelson's "O" -- an update of the treacherous tragedy "Othello," featuring a private school basketball hero standing in for the Moorish general driven to murdering his wife by a malicious, coldly calculating officer in his command.

Mekhi Phifer ("Soul Food," "Clockers") stars as Odin James, an inner-city import to highfalutin Palmetto Grove Academy. Odin has run afoul of Hugo (Josh Hartnett in the Iago role), a hoops teammate silently enraged by the feeling that his utilitarian talents are going unrecognized in Odin's long shadow -- even by the coach, Hugo's own father (Martin Sheen).